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DetlefK

(16,423 posts)
Tue Apr 26, 2016, 07:40 AM Apr 2016

Prospect of Trump-Presidency has Pentagon and CIA "Terrified. Shocked. Appalled." (Their words!)

http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/trump-at-war/

This perfunctory effort was perhaps to be expected, since Trump has a long and colorful history of showing disrespect toward men and women in uniform. He did not serve himself, avoiding the Vietnam War via four education deferments, followed by a medical deferment for bone spurs in his feet. ... But on numerous occasions, he has dismissed the experiences of those who did. ... “I always thought I was in the military” because of his time at the New York Military Academy ... The author, Michael D’Antonio, writes that Trump believed the academy “provided him with more military training than most actual soldiers.”

...

At times, his remarks on veterans and military service have veered into outright mockery. In a 1997 interview with Howard Stern, Trump likened his determination to avoid sexually transmitted infections to serving in combat. His sex life in the 1980s was “my personal Vietnam,” he said. “I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”

...

“I know more about ISIS than the generals do. Believe me,” he boasted in one speech, adding, "I’ve had a lot of wars of my own. I’m really good at war." His foreign policy prescriptions include proposals to “bomb the shit out of ISIS,” to “take out” the families of ISIS members and to torture terrorism suspects. (“Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I would,” he told one crowd. “And you know what? If it doesn't work, they deserve it anyway, for what they're doing.”) When it was pointed out that soldiers couldn’t legally carry out those last two actions, Trump was unconcerned. "They're not going to refuse me. Believe me.” (He walked back that last statement the next day.) The Geneva Conventions, he recently observed, have made American soldiers “afraid to fight.”

Trump’s pronouncements on foreign policy, combined with his years of broadsides, have set off a very real fear within military circles about what might happen were he to become president. In the last two months, I spoke with dozens of people in the national security realm—current and retired officers, veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and former White House, State Department, Pentagon and CIA officials. The words they used to describe their mood: Terrified. Shocked. Appalled. Never before, they say, has a candidate gotten so close to the White House with such little respect for the military.




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A chickenhawk wannabe-soldier without military experience who thinks he has more military experience than anybody else and who has openly promised to commit war-crimes.
13 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
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pipoman

(16,038 posts)
1. I don't want a Trump presidency
Tue Apr 26, 2016, 07:46 AM
Apr 2016

But I want a military establishment presidential pick even less....

 

pipoman

(16,038 posts)
13. I might stay home in Nov....
Wed Apr 27, 2016, 12:06 AM
Apr 2016

I certainly don't think Hillary is going to sweep...not at all sure she can win....

pampango

(24,692 posts)
3. "His foreign policy prescriptions include proposals to “bomb the shit out of ISIS,” to “take out”
Tue Apr 26, 2016, 08:26 AM
Apr 2016

the families of ISIS members and to torture terrorism suspects. (“Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I would,” he told one crowd. “And you know what? If it doesn't work, they deserve it anyway, for what they're doing.”) When it was pointed out that soldiers couldn’t legally carry out those last two actions, Trump was unconcerned. "They're not going to refuse me. Believe me.” (He walked back that last statement the next day.) The Geneva Conventions, he recently observed, have made American soldiers “afraid to fight.”

One former Marine infantry officer described Trump to me as a “fake-bake-ing chicken hawk” whose “knowledge of the Middle East could be trumped (sorry) by your average Georgetown sophomore.”

“They’re probably the least qualified group of foreign policy and national security advisers I’ve ever seen or even heard of,” said Richard Kohn, an expert in civil-military relations and retired professor at the University of North Carolina. ... In a TV appearance not long afterward, Trump said he wouldn’t hesitate to replace the members of his military team if they didn’t agree with him. (Trump’s campaign didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Trump prides himself on his unpredictability—“My moves are totally uncalculated,” he boasted to one biographer. He’s known as a micromanager who insisted on personally signing company checks and calling people his employees had already contacted to check their work. By his own admission, he gets “bored too easily” and relishes shaking up a company or an industry. “My attention span is short and probably my least favorite thing to do is maintain the status quo,” he has written. “Instead of being content when everything is going fine, I start getting impatient and irritable.” The culture at Trump’s company has been described as Darwinian.

He sounds like the kind of president that the military should be afraid of. He may not get what he wants from an uncooperative congress but he will be the commander-in-chief with few limitations on what he can do with his 'rebuilt' military.

global1

(25,253 posts)
5. They Might Be Saying This Because Of Trump's Negotiating Skills.....
Tue Apr 26, 2016, 09:10 AM
Apr 2016

That $1,000 toilet seat they may get for $2.00 under Trump. (sarcasm)

 

braddy

(3,585 posts)
12. There are a lot of myths about the toilet seats and hammers, for instance a toilet custom
Tue Apr 26, 2016, 10:43 AM
Apr 2016

made for a tiny number of aircraft, and the story being shortened to "a toilet seat", or a half dozen special wrenches designed and machined, costing a thousand dollars apiece, and being shortened to "I could have bought almost the same thing at Sears for $30.00". or a special comfort center in an aircraft meant to deliver paratroopers and masses of troops in long overseas flights and supply coffee and drinks to hundreds of men being shortened to "a $7000.00 dollar coffee pot.".

Much waste exists in such a unique environment as the military,that is also a giant bureaucracy, but it isn't always as described, and what is described is not always accurate, some here are old enough to remember how 60 Minutes and the media had us all convinced that our M1 Abrams tank with it's turbine engines was a billion dollar disaster that would never function in the desert, and then when it hit field in Desert Storm, it blew our minds.

Here are some discussions of that sort of thing. http://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the-600-hammer/5271/

http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=96;t=000012;p=0

snappyturtle

(14,656 posts)
10. Well the Pentagon and CIA scare the hell out of me.
Tue Apr 26, 2016, 10:26 AM
Apr 2016

They're probably afraid of any presidential candidate that would hold them accountable for their
negligence in spending.

N_E_1 for Tennis

(9,734 posts)
11. Read this entire article...
Tue Apr 26, 2016, 10:29 AM
Apr 2016

Then went to the website noted in the article, war on the rocks, very interesting place.

Personally I believe the intelligence agencies will not "allow" a Trump presidency.

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